Make my Divi website load faster

Do you want to make your Divi website load faster?

“How do i make my Divi website load faster?” is a question often seen in the various Divi Facebook groups, and something i was asking myself when www.divithemeexamples.com was running very slow, with page load times of 10+ seconds. This was bad in terms of annoying the hell out of my users and making Google take a dim view of my website too.

You can test your site performance using free online tools such as Pingdom or GT Metrix. GT Metrix gives you a nice results page that outlines where you may be going wrong which makes it much easier to plan what needs to be done.

So, below is a list of things that i did to make Divi Theme Examples run faster and get to a much more reasonable load time of around 2-3 seconds, down from 10+ seconds.

1 – Compressing & resizing Images > WP Smushit > I always compress my images before i upload them so they were already reasonably well compressed, but by adding the Smushit plugin i was able to reduce their filesizes even further. Some images were being re-sized via CSS because their actual pixel dimensions were larger than the on screen dimensions. For these, i re-sized them manually to be the correct dimensions.

2 – Cloudflare CDN > Cloudflare > Distribute your content around the world so it’s closer to your visitors (speeding up your site). Many hosts (including Siteground web hosting) will have an easy 1 click activation in your cPanel, so it takes 2 seconds to get it up and running. Remember to activate developer more when you are making edits to your website so you can actually see the changes you make. The developer mode will disable Cloudflare for 3 hours and automatically reactivate it in case you forget!

3 – Caching Plugin > WP Supercache >There are a few different options for caching plugins but I am using WP Supercache plugin that will generate static HTML files from your WordPress/Divi files. Once the html files are generated your hosting server will use the HTML files rather than having to process the PHP scripts.

4 – Remove query strings from static resources > Remove query strings from static resources > This plugin does exactly what it says on the tin. Resources with a “?” or “&” in the URL are not cached by some proxy caching servers, so moving the query string and encode the parameters into the URL will increase your WordPress site performance significant.

6 – Delete WP post and page revisions – WP-Optimize – On DiviThemeExamples.com, i had over 1000 post/page revisions that were adding to the size of my database, and were not actually needed. The WP-Optimize plugin allows you to quickly delete them (and other entries cluttering up your database) and free up your database for faster processing times.

7 – Hosting Upgrade > Panthur > I have used Panthur.com.au for a long time now and whilst I was tempted to move over to Siteground and be based in the US, I decided to stay with Panthur as i have had nothing but a great experience with them to date. I upgraded divithemeexamples.com to a Puma Stealth hosting plan which added extra resources to handle the high traffic the site was getting. If you are hitting your limits for your hosting account then i would try the points above 1st and then if that is still not enough it may be time to upgrade!

8 – Run Divi version 3.0.52+ ( updated 6-28-2017 ) > Divi got a speed optimization boost in the core theme in this release which means that all custom design styles created using the Divi Builder, the Divi Theme Options and the Divi Theme Customizer are now compiled and minified into static CSS resources.

8 – Divi Nitro > Divi Nitro offers a range of speed optimization setting that can help speed up your Divi site. I am using this on Divi Theme Examples and have seen a speed improvement with the plugin.

Do you have any other optimization tips for making a Divi Theme website lightening fast? Let me know in the comments below.

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